Marketing

Maia Purcell

“Sell-Care”: The commercialization of self-care in influencer marketing

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Maia Purcell is a communications professional with experience in marketing, digital content strategy, and institutional communications. Her work spans higher education, healthcare, and community organizations, where she develops clear, audience-focused messaging across platforms. Maia is particularly interested in strategic storytelling, audience engagement, and how organizations translate complex ideas into accessible content. She is passionate about communications that strengthen public understanding, build meaningful connections, and support impactful initiatives.

This study examines how self-care is constructed within TikTok influencer marketing and how these representations shape its contemporary understandings. Using qualitative content analysis, 30 posts from influencers with over 100,000 followers were analyzed across themes including product promotion, beauty maintenance, emotional wellbeing language, individualized responsibility, and gendered targeting. The findings show that 83% of posts centre on beauty and consumption, often using  language to frame purchasing as a response to stress and burnout. This framing positions self-care as an individual responsibility while masking the broader structural conditions that create the need for it in the first place. The study concludes that influencer marketing narrows the meaning of self-care into a consumptive practice, marginalizing simple, relational and collective, forms of self-care.

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